"Belmont."
Trevor does not, exactly, jump, but that's got significantly more to do with the fact he's half frozen than he'd like. He does fumble his journal and end up juggling it for a moment before regaining his grip. Then he twists around and snarls, "You fucking prick! Are you that - arg!" He throws up his hands. "I could ambush you too if I felt like it! This doesn't prove anything!"
"My apologies," Alucard says in the least apologetic way possible.
"Fuck you!"
"I was curious about your startle response."
"I'll stab you in your fucking smug face, how's that for my fucking response!"
"Normal," Alucard says.
Trevor kicks at Alucard's knee. Alucard flickers a foot back.
"It's a legitimately useful diagnostic criteria."
"It hurts your stupid ego that much to think I'm not scared of you?" God, he can't believe he kept his mouth shut all night, even when he saw several cats, because he mistakenly gave half a shit about Alucard's stupid paranoia.
"You've made it very clear you're not scared of me."
"And it pisses you off."
"No," Alucard lies.
"You're such a fucking liar," Trevor tells him.
"I don't like the context," Alucard says. "I don't like that this was done to you, and whoever else."
"Whoever else?" Trevor repeats. "What, now there's more of us?"
"From how you're acting with Sypha, they're all dead."
"Everyone I know is dead for normal reasons," Trevor says. "And none of it was to vampires, different monsters." They don't get credit for Letty, if you get killed because you're mostly dead from fever thanks to fucking weretigers it's the fucking weretiger's point.
Not that dying to enough vampires is anything to be ashamed about. Just doesn't come up much. It's rare there's that many vampires in one place and when there are it's obvious there's way too many and that going straight in would be s-
A light flares on the ground. Unnecessarily dramatic - it's still dark-ish, but it's close enough to dawn you can see well enough. "Oh, Alucard's back," Sypha says. "I'm going back to sleep. Stop yelling."
"It's Alucard's fault!"
"I'm sure," she mumbles. "Stop yelling."
She goes back inside. There is, perhaps, an entire minute of silence, and then Alucard asks, "Why are you on the roof?"
Right. "I didn't say anything to anything," Trevor starts. "Nothing has been said on this roof until you got here. Except for talking to Sypha when I climbed up originally," he amends. "But otherwise, nothing. So you have nothing to complain about."
"You felt compelled to separate yourself from Sypha and stay awake while everyone else slept, despite your original intention of -"
"No, that was me lying," Trevor interrupts. "I figured I'd have a bad time of it if I tried to sleep, but I said that stuff so you'd leave and..." Is he not supposed to mention it? "...Do stuff," he finishes after a hopefully none too suspicious pause. "The stuff you needed to do. And Sypha needed sleep. But I didn't say anything, at all, while I was up here so I couldn't have accidentally been passing messages to whoever you're worried about. Not even to the black cat I saw!"
"Black cats aren't magic."
"I know they're not magic! They're friendly and if I said something it'd probably come over. But instead of getting to pet a cat I sat in dead fucking silence up here."
Alucard appears to be weighing this. "Thank you."
"It was an enormous sacrifice."
"I thought you liked dogs."
"You can like both!"
"Cats aren't deformed, inappropriate morons, though," Alucard says. "I assumed that was what you liked about them."
Trevor stares at him for a second, then inappropriate clicks into place and he howls with laughter. "You - you really are the stuck up kind of dog," he manages eventually. "Too good for a nose up your ass?"
"The dogs are all yours," Alucard says graciously. "You might be a bit rank for them, though. I'd suggest finding something particularly rotten and rolling in it in the hopes the juices will cover the smell. Perhaps then you'll manage to get lucky with a dog possessing abysmally low standards."
"As Sypha explained, sex with animals is wrong because man is divine."
"Then why am I…?"
"It's not bestiality if you're literally a dog."
"That makes no sense."
"Does so," Trevor says.
Sypha lands on the side of the roof. "You are so loud," she tells them.
Trevor considers apologizing. Sypha, being not real, doesn't really need sleep. Yeah, he's good.
She ignites another flame in her hand. It really isn't dark enough to need that and - and he just wishes she wouldn't. It doesn't look right. It wavers and jumps about like she's going to collapse and he knows it's just she's not as practiced but it just. It's like she's going to collapse.
"So!" Sypha says, and he tears his eyes away from the flame. "Speaking of that. You can transform," Sypha says to Alucard.
"Into a dog."
"I really want to see," Sypha explains.
Alucard eyes her with extremely valid distrust. "No."
"Belmont, why won't Alucard do this one little thing?"
"Probably because it's fucked up looking. Vampires don't transform like most monsters, it's a spell and he's got to actually make the shape. Stands to reason there's something really wrong with whatever he turns into since Alucard apparently loves hobbies he's bad at."
"You said you approved of his wolfy feet," Sypha says.
"I did not say I approved. I just said they weren't leaving werewolf tracks. He turned into a dog just once, in the middle of the fight at the castle," Trevor explains. "Ran around, stepped in blood, left some pawprints, tore someone's throat out, turned back, never mentioned it again. I didn't have time to wonder about that but now I'm sure it's because he knows to be ashamed of how bad his stuck-up dog impression is. He was mostly fur," Trevor adds.
"Alucard! Are you fluffy?!"
Trevor continues, "Probably to hide how deformed everything under it was."
"It is not," Alucard says petulantly. "Actual wolves found me convincing. You don't even know what wolves are."
"Why do you want Alucard to be a dog, though?" Trevor asks. "You don't hate stuck up devil dogs any less than you do regular ones."
"Well, obviously if it's Alucard I don't need to worry he'll bite me," Sypha says, which is so backward it's insulting.
"I can't believe you think stuck-up vampire devil dogs are less bitey than regular nice ones."
"Alucard, if you turn into a real wolf and I can see it's a wolf and not a dog, I'll make Belmont stop calling you one."
"God Himself will not make me stop," Trevor says. "Because I am right."
"Don't you want to prove Belmont's wrong?" Sypha says, all sweetness.
"Pretty clear which of us is right and which of us is lying about how shoddy his dog impression is."
"Fine," Alucard snaps, and - haha, oh, he changes but then jumps straight up before Sypha's attempt to shove her hand into his fur can connect. Did Alucard actually see that coming for once or did he just vampire-reflex his way out of it?
Dog-Alucard changes back into Regular-Alucard, still floating.
"I didn't get to see!" Sypha objects.
"You don't see with your hands," Alucard says.
"How are my eyes supposed to know if your fur is any good?"
"Why do your eyes need to know that?"
"You're not fun at all," she whines.
"Thank you," he says, with even for him exaggerated graciousness. He floats back down to sit on the rooftop again. He puts his hands on his knees and - wait.
"How many pairs of gloves do you have?" Trevor asks. "Do you have spares of everything? How many salamanders is that?"
"Hm? No, these are the same ones."
Alucard bit the glove in half, Trevor saw it. So, what, did he sit down there and stitch them back up? If Alucard knows how to actually stitch things and he still let Sypha have free rein on Trevor's head Trevor is going to be royally pissed. He grabs for the glove, which doesn't have stitches in it and he touches Alucard's freezing wrist in the process and -
"What the fuck, Alucard?" he shouts, jerking back.
"Are you just going to shout at everything you notice?" Alucard asks.
"I - did you - what the fuck is wrong with you!" Trevor shrieks. "Did you forget what you were supposed to be doing! You are the worst vampire to ever live!"
"What?"
"Belmont, I have to agree, what's the problem?" Sypha says.
He grabs her arm and smacks her palm down on Alucard's face. "See?"
"Why are you doing this?" Alucard asks.
"Alucard is...here on the roof? Not an illusion?"
"His skin is cold!"
"I am a vampire, Belmont. We've been through this."
Sypha pulls her hand back, looking even more baffled.
"It's not cold if they ate, which he should've done, that was the point of telling him to go down there by himself, only he didn't because he got distracted stitching up his stupid glove apparently!"
Alucard looks disgusted. "That is not how it works."
"Yes it is! Everyone knows that!"
"I have heard that..." Sypha agrees.
"See?"
"But before he was acting like..." Sypha trails off, because apparently probably not even capable of handling stairs was not something she wanted Alucard to hear. Trevor should probably have mentioned -
"I heard your conversation," Alucard tells her. Well, that's taken care of. "Again, I am a vampire."
"Oh. How...much?"
"Until Belmont started shouting about your dead brother and you both stayed quiet for a while."
Trevor watches as Sypha runs through the conversation with various looks of dismay, which is very much like how she'd looked last time she found this out. Then her expression turns murderous and -
"I forgot you didn't know!" Trevor says. "I told you - I told Sypha ages ago in the future. Also it's really his fault for eavesdropping." If it wasn't something vampires had to do on purpose, you'd never be able to get the drop on them. They have to know you're there and choose to keep listening, and shutting up or splitting up is usually enough to put a stop to it.
"Vampire," Alucard repeats again, like that's an excuse.
"Which is what we should actually be focusing on, the fact Alucard is too fucking braindead to remember he's a vampire when it actually matters!"
"I don't understand why you'd expect this," Alucard says.
"Why I would expect you to be capable of feeding yourself!" Trevor agrees. "Why would I expect you to make literally any attempt to not fucking die!"
"It has been several days now, and you really did look like you hurt yourself earlier," Sypha says. "And you said that dhampirs can't go a long time without eating like Belmont claimed."
"I'd only become fevered," Alucard spits, "if I grossly overate, and I have no idea why this would be expected of me because however childish it's something only turned vampires could possibly think is a good idea. This is the temperature I'm supposed to be and I don't see why anyone would expect dhampirs to be delusional about that the way turned vampires are."
"Maybe the reason Alucard thinks dhampirs have to eat constantly is because he doesn't know how eating works," Trevor tells Sypha. "Maybe I was right about dhampirs, maybe I'm the expert on everything, and Alucard is just fucking insane and can't be trusted farther than you can't throw him. Vampires do work like this, it's why you can't just go oh this one doesn't feel like a frozen corpse I guess they're a normal upstanding member of society and had nothing to do with the body everyone just found."
Alucard looks like he's about to go on another rant but then pauses and considers him. "Do you remember being told that?"
"How could I know something I wasn't told?"
"Do you remember who told you that, then? A specific person or time?"
"Yeah? Every older member of the family bitched about it at least once and also it's written in the bestiary what with it being pretty damn important to know."
"So this is something Belmonts learn," Alucard decides, because apparently that was in question.
"Why the fuck would a vampire or demon or angry owl tell me about how vampires that just ate are better at pretending not to be vampires?"
"It's overeating! The excess magic that can't be metabolized bleeds off as heat," Alucard says. "It's like eating a meal only to throw it up again only it lasts longer and it feels disgusting the whole time and I would sooner light myself on fire!"
Christ in Heaven Alucard is so dramatic about everything.
Sypha says, "Does that work?"
What?
"Yes."